Kolbe Report 1/11/25

At the outset, it is important to remember that the International Theological Commission (ITC) serves in an advisory role to the Vatican and its "documents are not considered expressions of authoritative church teaching."  The document on Communion and Stewardship has to be evaluated in this context, especially since the magisterial documents that the Kolbe Center cites in its publications are of a higher level of authority than any ITC document. Having said this, it is worth noting that nothing in Communion and Stewardship offers any authoritative abrogation of the magisterial teachings cited in the article “The Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Creation” on the Kolbe website.  However, the two documents differ in two fundamental respects.  In the first place, they differ in respect to fundamental truths related to origins that are left out of Communion and Stewardship (without being condemned) and in the second place over their understanding of the limitations of natural science.

As an example of the first difference, consider the section of Communion and Stewardship that deals with human sexual differences.  The Ecumenical Council of Vienne, the Pontifical Biblical Commission rulings of 1909, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Holy Marriage, and other authoritative magisterial teachings have taught that God literally formed Eve from Adam’s side.  In the light of these facts, isn’t it rather remarkable that this infallible teaching of the ordinary Magisterium does not even get a mention in the section of this document devoted to the origins and meaning of human sexuality?  Doesn’t this reveal a certain unhealthy tendency to overemphasize the new and unauthoritative speculations of modern Popes while ignoring or downplaying authoritative magisterial teachings on important topics?

It is interesting that when the document does take seriously the authoritative magisterial teaching of the past, that authoritative teaching weighs heavily against evolutionary speculation.  For example, in section 30, the authors write that:

In order to maintain the unity of body and soul clearly taught in revelation, the Magisterium adopted the definition of the human soul as forma substantialis (cf. Council of Vienne and the Fifth Lateran Council). Here the Magisterium relied on Thomistic anthropology which, drawing upon the philosophy of Aristotle, understands body and soul as the material and spiritual principles of a single human being.

This definition rules out the possibility that the body of a beast could be prepared to receive a human soul.  On the other hand, it is also worth noting that even when teaching the orthodox Catholic doctrine of human origins, the authors of Communion and Stewardship leave themselves open to being misinterpreted in heterodox ways.  For example, in section 43, they write:

Every individual human being as well as the whole human community are created in the image of God. In its original unity – of which Adam is the symbol – the human race is made in the image of the divine Trinity. . .

It is not entirely wrong to call Adam “the symbol” of the original unity of the human race, but it is exactly the kind of statement that is often misinterpreted by many theologians who seize upon such statements to argue that Adam is only a symbol and not a real individual from whom all human beings are descended.  It is revealing that the authors, who must be aware of these rampant misinterpretations, do not take more pains to guard against them.  It is also worth noting that some of their best statements do not make sense except in light of the traditional doctrine of creation that is defended by the Kolbe Center. For example, in section 43 they also write:

Sharing in a created human nature and confessing the triune God who dwells among us, we are nonetheless divided by sin and await the victorious coming of Christ who will restore and recreate the unity God wills in a final redemption of creation (cf. Rom 8:18-19).

In this passage the authors refer to the restoration of the original unity of creation.  But in the theistic evolutionary account of origins that is treated so approvingly later in the document, there is no original unity of creation to be restored.  It might be argued that the authors are only speaking of the original human unity, but in that case they would be misinterpreting Romans 8 which clearly speaks of the restoration of the entire creation.  It is only the traditional doctrine of creation that teaches that the entire universe was created in perfect integrity and harmony for man in the beginning and that this integrity and harmony was lost through Adam’s sin.  According to theistic evolution, there never has been a time when the entire universe existed with all of its parts in a state of perfect harmony before the Original Sin.

As mentioned above, however, the greatest weakness of the document is the way that it embraces a uniformitarian philosophy of natural science that is completely at odds with Catholic tradition.  The authors write:

63. According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the “Big Bang” and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life.

In this passage the authors forget almost 2000 years of Catholic theology and philosophy which carefully distinguished between the period of creation and the period of providence, and approve of wild extrapolations from present-day observations to conditions at the very beginning of creation allegedly 15 billion years ago.  Thus, they are prepared to make a radical departure from all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils by restricting the creative action of God, in the strict sense, to the moment of the alleged Big Bang!  What makes this even more disturbing is that the same authors were apparently completely unaware of the numerous expert scientists all over the world who reject the Big Bang hypothesis on purely scientific grounds.

Even as Communion and Stewardship was being published and distributed, a document was posted on the internet whose signatories now number in the hundreds of professional scientists and engineers who reject the Big Bang hypothesis on scientific grounds.  Here is the statement:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed―inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypo-thetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt,” in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method―the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang’s validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe. [End of Open Letter] (emphasis added). See www.cosmologystatement.org

Is it not remarkable that the authors of the ITT document do not even mention the variety of scientific opinion on this issue, or the possibility that the Big Bang hypothesis could be wrong?  Isn’t this ipso facto proof that they did not do their homework in regard to the state of the scientific evidence?  The authors’ deference to the speculations of biological evolutionists is even more remarkable.  They write:

While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5-4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. However it is to be explained, the decisive factor in human origins was a continually increasing brain size, culminating in that of homo sapiens. With the development of the human brain, the nature and rate of evolution were permanently altered: with the introduction of the uniquely human factors of consciousness, intentionality, freedom and creativity, biological evolution was recast as social and cultural evolution.

The reality is that cutting edge sedimentology, in particular the work of Guy Berthault, Alexander Lalomov and others, has shown that huge sedimentary rock formations can form (and have formed) very rapidly, and did not require the millions of years assigned to them by Lyellian geologists.  Experts in physics like Jean de Pontcharra have shown that radiometric dating methods are based on unproven assumptions and are completely unreliable.  And cutting-edge genetics has demonstrated that mutations and natural selection cannot provide the engine for biological evolution—on the contrary, they have a devolutionary effect on the genome so that genetic information degrades over time.  As their blithe acceptance of the Big Bang hypothesis demonstrates, the authors of the ITC document did not exercise due diligence in evaluating the claims of mainstream materialistic natural science speculations.  Then, rather than turning to the wealth of authoritative magisterial teaching on origins to provide a framework within which to evaluate these speculations, the authors appeal to a letter favorable to evolutionary theory from Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body which has no magisterial authority whatsoever, and which has published a number of papers advocating positions contrary to Catholic doctrine in recent decades, including the promotion of GMO food to solve the problem of hunger in Africa, the use of the fatally flawed standard “brain death” criteria to determine human death, and recommendations that family size be limited to two children per family.